The Contemporary Family and its Representations

Abstract

An exemplary ideological representation of the “new” family is the film Under the Tuscan Sun (2003). The film traces the emergence of a multicultural, polysexual and multirelational family in contemporary Tuscany that has as its core a heterosexual American woman who purchases a run-down villa while on vacation with a gay tour. The very fact that this single heterosexual woman is vacationing on a gay tour is of course itself a sign of the shifts in the common sense and the “acceptable” that the film will portray. The main character, who is recently divorced, starts out alone and in a more “traditional” and “familiar” context, but by the end of the film she is hosting a wedding and surrounded by her new family.